Abstract [en]

Agile ways of working are nowadays used in many software development departments even in larger organizations. When scaling up agile ways of working, new practices for coordinating teams become necessary. Instead of inventing practices on their own, many organizations are implementing the ScaledAgile Framework but the impacts on team performance due to these practices are not much studied. Data was obtained by means of a survey questionnaire that was answered by 111 team members from two organizations, one from the automotive industry and one of the major Swedish banks. The study suggests that efficient inter-team coordination does not have a positive relationship to team performance. But, as shown in several other contexts, a high level of psychological safety has a significant positive impact on team performance in a large-scale agile software development setting

Abstract [en]

Scrum and eXtreme programming, the first agile development frameworks, were designed with very few advice on coordination for work in larger scale were several teams cooperate toward a common goal. This lead to both wrong assumptions regarding the usefulness of agile ways of working in larger organizations as well as much individual tailoring with coordination practices in organizations. Now, the Scaled Agile Framework is gaining much attention in software development. This study contains an analysis of inter-team coordination practices prescribed in the framework and how they have been implemented in three organizations. Previous research on coordination has been criticized for having a static view on coordination with not enough focus on how to manage emerging dependency issues. The result of this study shows that the Scaled Agile Framework have four practices that cover both planning and emerging issues and three practices solely aimed at managing these emerging dependency issues.

Abstract [en]

Inter-team coordination has been recognized as one of the most important challenges in large-scale agile development settings. Except specific practices, such asScrum of Scrums meetings, certain roles are oftenreported to be responsible for areas of coordination incase studies. Although agile values state thatcoordination should be dealt with face-to-face byindividuals, two commonly used prescriptive frameworksfor large-scale agile development suggests contrastingways of coordinating regarding roles and theirresponsibilities. One propose additional coordinating roles leaving less mandate and autonomy to the single team while the other propose no additional roles, compared to the original roles of Scrum, allowing more autonomy to the teams. This literature review is an analysis of roles assigned with the responsibility for inter-team coordination in 42 case studies of large-scale agile development settings. The review shows that only four of the analyzed organizations appoints roles according to the large-scale agile frameworks. Rather, a wide range of different additional roles with different role tailoring is displayed where the majority is focusing on vertical coordination rather than horizontal coordination. In three of the cases, the role setup has specificallytargeted coordination for architectural issues. The study shows that the prescriptive frameworks are seen as toolboxes leaving the responsibility for tailoring to the single organization. This implies a stronger need for theoretical support on what to use as basis for tailoring of roles and their responsibilities.

Abstract [en]

In the last fifteen years we have witnessed a vast spread of new methods for managing projects within software development. In 2001, the Agile Manifesto stated the common values and principles of these methods, all aimed at producing better software. Several of these values and principals are specifically expressed for designing and programming software products. Since then, the benefits of these methods have led to a widespread use of agile project management even in non-software development contexts. But, how does these values and principals affect projects in non-software areas since some values and principals are not applicable? Do they perceive the same benefits? This paper presents a systematic literature review aimed at identifying benefits in projects adopting agile methods in non-software development contexts. Out of the 21 case studies analysed, most reported projects were from manufacturing companies but even from areas such as library management and strategy management. The most frequently reported benefits were related to team work, customer interaction, productivity and flexibility. The main parts of the benefits were corresponding to the first value in the Agile Manifesto: Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

Abstract

Companies in the IT industry today often use agile project management methods to govern their projects. Agilemethods value high transparency, self-organizing teams and a process to inspect and adapt. Some of the tools and disciplines from these agile methods are purely aimed at software development. The hypothesis of this paper is that the agile project management methods are suitable in other areas as well. This paper presents preliminary findings and conclusions about using agile project management methods in public event projects.

The case study, carried out with an action research methodology, investigates the Swedish company Galaxen

who have organized public music and culture events since 1992. This research indicates that several techniques and principles, originally developed for software programmers, can be adopted also in the area of public events. Time-boxed iterations and visual tools for planning, collaboration and follow up are being used with great success